PDF Summary:The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Most people assume that human history has been marked by increasing violence and brutality. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker challenges this assumption with data showing that violence has actually declined over time—from medieval homicide rates to modern warfare casualties. He examines how this decline has occurred across different types of violence, from murder to armed conflict to the treatment of marginalized groups.

Pinker explores the forces behind this shift toward peace, including the development of governments and institutions, changing cultural values, and cognitive shifts in how people view violence and morality. He also discusses the Rights Revolutions of the late 20th century and how factors like women's empowerment and evolving social norms have contributed to reduced violence. This guide examines Pinker's analysis of the historical data and the mechanisms that have driven humanity toward greater peace.

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The Human Security Report Project found that political violence—including warfare, terrorism, genocide, and deaths caused by warlords and militias—directly led to 17,400 deaths globally that year, representing a rate of 0.0003 (three-hundredths of a percent). Even if we liberally increased the figure twentyfold to estimate unrecorded deaths in battle and indirectly from starvation and illness due to war, it would still be under 1 percent.

(Shortform note: The 0.0003 figure is likely an underestimate. Conflict-mortality research, which uses household surveys to estimate the number of people killed in conflict, has found that official estimates of deaths in conflict are often much lower than the actual number of people killed. This is because many deaths in conflict are not reported, and because the definition of “conflict” can be broad and include deaths from disease, starvation, and other causes.)

The main divide in the graph is between organized states and chaotic tribes and bands. Economists Richard Steckel and John Wallis have recently examined data from 900 Native American skeletons found in a range from southern Canada to South America, dating from before Columbus's arrival. They categorized the skeletons as either belonging to hunter-gatherers or to those who lived in cities, specifically the Andean and Mesoamerican societies of the Inca, Aztec, and Maya. Thirteen point four percent of the hunter-gatherers exhibited evidence of violent trauma, which matches the average from figure 2-2. 2.7 percent of the city-dweller sample had signs of trauma from violence, which is similar to data for state societies before this century. Thus, controlling for various factors, it appears that residing in a civilized society makes experiencing violence five times less likely.

The Limits of Skeletal Evidence

In The Bioarchaeology of Violence, Debra L. Martin, Ryan P. Harrod, and Ventura R. Pérez argue that the skeletal evidence for violence is an inherently incomplete and selective archive of past harm. Only a subset of injuries ever affect bone, only a subset of those bones survive burial and taphonomic processes, and only a subset of surviving remains are recovered and analyzed. This means that frequencies of trauma in skeletal samples must always be treated as minimum estimates rather than precise measures of how often people in the past experienced violence. This makes it difficult to justify a claim that residing in a civilized society makes experiencing violence five times less likely.

Processes for Decreasing Violence

Sweeping Changes in Pacification Through History

Pinker explains that the process of civilization expanded beyond Western Europe to other regions globally. In the late 1800s, the nations with the least conflict were the United Kingdom, along with those in the regions of France, Germany, Denmark, and the Benelux area. Today, this peaceful core has grown to include all of Western and Central Europe, which are now the world's most nonviolent regions. Other countries with low homicide rates include those that were once under British rule, like the Maldives, Bermuda, Canada, Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand. Some Asian countries, including Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which have embraced Western influences, also experience minimal murder rates.

(Shortform note: Some critics argue that the countries Pinker identifies as the least violent are only peaceful because they’ve exported their violence to other countries. For example, the philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe argues that some modern states maintain a peaceful domestic environment by exercising a “politics of death” over marginalized populations. He explains that these states use their power to determine who lives and who dies, creating “death-worlds” where large groups of people are forced to live in conditions that make them the “living dead.”)

China also has a low homicide figure, though it's unclear whether this is due to its long-standing centralized government or its current authoritarian regime. Well-established authoritarian regimes, including numerous Islamic nations, usually experience minimal violent crime because they closely monitor their citizens and punish them harshly for any wrongdoing.

(Shortform note: In some cases, authoritarian regimes don’t experience minimal violent crime because they censor or manipulate crime statistics. For example, the [Global Study on Homicide 2013](https://www.un-ilibrary.org/drugs-crime-and-terrorism/global-study-on-homicide-2013c1241a80-en)_ notes that some countries with authoritarian regimes report low homicide rates, but these rates may not reflect the true level of violence due to underreporting or misclassification of deaths. This suggests that the relationship between authoritarian control and low violence isn’t always straightforward.)

Yet, the regions with the highest crime rates globally are currently Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and sections of Latin America. A number of these nations have crooked law enforcement and legal institutions that demand bribes from offenders and those they wronged, while selling protection to those who pay the most. Countries such as Jamaica, Mexico, and Colombia suffer from drug-funded militias acting illegally. Countries such as Russia and South Africa might have experienced a reversal of the civilizing process after their previous governments fell. This reversal has also affected many countries that underwent a shift from tribal societies to being colonized and then abruptly becoming independent, like those in regions of Africa below the Sahara and Papua New Guinea.

Shock Therapy and the Rise of Modern Violence

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein argues that the rise of violence in post-Soviet Russia, post-apartheid South Africa, and many Latin American countries can be traced to the imposition of radical free-market reforms, often referred to as “shock therapy.” These reforms, implemented by Western economists and institutions, involved rapid privatization of public assets, slashing of social protections, and the weakening of state institutions, including the police and courts. Klein contends that these policies created power vacuums that allowed oligarchs, mafias, and paramilitary groups to seize control of key sectors of the economy and territory. The resulting climate of corruption, everyday violence, and fear became a central mechanism of social and political control, complicating the narrative of a simple reversal of the civilizing process.

Focused Movements & Contemporary Peace

Pinker argues that focused movements like the Rights Revolutions have contributed to contemporary peace. These revolutions are a series of campaigns for civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and animal welfare that took place in the latter part of the 20th century. They've lowered a variety of sources of mortality and distress, and have cultivated a growing cultural rejection of violence in all its forms. These liberal revolutions drew from compassion and rationality and were expressed in the rhetoric of rights.

(Shortform note: In The Last Utopia, Samuel Moyn argues that the contemporary centrality of “human rights” is best understood not as the triumphant culmination of a timeless Western tradition, but as a contingent moral and political project that crystallized in the 1970s. He explains that the discrediting of revolutionary socialism and the exhaustion of anticolonial nationalism opened space for a new, comparatively modest utopian language in which transnational activism reoriented itself around the protection of individual victims and the restraint of state violence rather than programs for sweeping social transformation.)

Pinker explains that the Rights Revolutions were linked with progressive movements and spread on a spectrum that stretches from Western Europe to the U.S. blue states to the U.S. red states to the democracies in Asia and Latin America, and then to more authoritarian nations, with Africa and most of the Islamic world lagging behind. They've made Western societies overly concerned with appropriateness and taboos, leading to deserved ridicule as political correctness. These efforts have also caused us to forget their achievements. A lot of individuals hesitate to recognize the successes, partly because they aren't aware of the statistics, and partly due to a tendency to shift goals that prompts activists to maintain pressure by not acknowledging progress.

The Rights Revolutions and the Eurocentric Grand Narrative

Some scholars from the Global South have criticized the idea that Africa and most of the Islamic world are “lagging behind” Western societies in the Rights Revolutions. In Human Rights, Kenyan legal scholar Makau Mutua argues that the dominant international human rights discourse is built on a Eurocentric grand narrative that casts Europe and North America as the normative center of history and portrays African and Islamic societies as backward, pathological, or deficient, in need of transformation by Western norms. He explains that this narrative erases the agency, intellectual traditions, and emancipatory struggles of non-Western peoples and turns their own moral universes into objects of tutelage rather than sources of universal principles.

Underlying Drivers of Pacification

We will explore how structural and institutional pacifiers, as well as cognitive and cultural shifts, have helped lower violence.

Structural & Institutional Pacifiers

Pinker claims that competent governments and global bodies have helped reduce civil wars. Countries are more susceptible to civil wars if they have many people, mountainous areas, governments that are recently formed or unsteady, major petroleum exports, and a high percentage of males who are young.

However, the frequency of civil war has declined as governments have become more effective at safeguarding and benefiting their citizens. Additionally, global society is now penalizing and ostracizing countries ruled by inept tyrants. Global peacekeeping forces have also helped reduce civil wars. Having peacekeepers present decreases the likelihood of returning to conflict by 80 percent. Peacekeepers can take action against those who violate a peace accord, oversee adherence to the agreement, and carry out daily policing tasks.

The Limits of Peacekeeping

While competent governments and global peacekeeping forces have helped reduce civil wars, they’re not always effective. In The Trouble with the Congo, Séverine Autesserre argues that international peacekeeping missions often fail to address the root causes of conflict, focusing instead on elite power-sharing agreements and state-building. She explains that this top-down approach often overlooks local grievances and power struggles that fuel violence. Autesserre’s analysis of the Congo conflict shows that when peacekeeping missions ignore these local dynamics, they fail to prevent the recurrence of violence.

Cognitive & Cultural Shifts Towards Peace

Pinker argues that cognitive and cultural shifts have played a role in a decrease in violence. A sustained period of peace might result from a psychological shift in how people view war. In the past, those seeking power, status, or revenge could rely on their political connections to back their goals and ignore the suffering of their victims. They considered armed conflict legitimate. Now, it's more common for people to view war as an issue that needs resolution instead of a competition with winners. They tend to adopt others' viewpoints and see the pointlessness of violence begetting more violence.

The Life Cycle of Anti-War Norms

In political science, the idea that people’s views of war have changed is often discussed in terms of the rise of anti-war norms. In their influential 1998 article, Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink argue that international norms develop through a life cycle in which norm entrepreneurs first articulate and promote new standards of appropriate behavior, these norms then reach a tipping point and cascade as states adopt them for reasons of legitimacy and socialization, and over time they become internalized so that they help constitute state identities and interests and shape what policymakers regard as acceptable and legitimate courses of action in international politics. This process helps explain how changing norms can alter the very identities of political leaders and the range of actions they consider legitimate in the first place.

We will explore how expanding moral understanding and evolving social norms and values have helped reduce violence.

Increasing Ethical Awareness

Pinker argues that broadening our moral understanding has helped reduce violence. Morality can be a force for violence, but it can also promote peace. The same moral sense that can lead individuals to perpetrate atrocities can also drive them to make significant progress, such as the human rights movements of the last few decades and the social changes of the Enlightenment.

The mentality of taboo, which is part of the mentality of morality, can also pull in either direction. It can transform religious or sexual nonconformity into something seen as outrageous that demands horrific retribution, but it can also stop people from moving toward dangerous actions, like conquest wars, using chemical or nuclear arms, dehumanizing racial clichés, making light references to rape, and taking recognizable human lives.

The Role of Taboo in Shaping Moral Judgments

In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the concept of taboo and its role in shaping moral judgments. She argues that taboos are not arbitrary prohibitions but rather reflect a society's underlying system of classification and order. Taboos serve to maintain the boundaries between categories of purity and pollution, order and disorder. Douglas suggests that violations of taboos are perceived as threats to the social and moral order, eliciting strong emotional responses and often harsh punishments. This framework helps explain why certain actions, such as religious or sexual nonconformity, can provoke intense moral outrage and calls for retribution. At the same time, the existence of taboos can also prevent people from engaging in behaviors deemed dangerous or immoral, such as the use of chemical weapons or dehumanizing language.

Evolving Social Norms & Values

Pinker also believes that evolving cultural norms and values have fostered peace. He explains that societies where women have more empowerment tend to be less violent. This is because men are generally aggressive to vie for status and mates, while women are more inclined to avoid aggression to protect their children. Societies that respect women's interests tend to have fewer young males, who are the likeliest to act violently. This is because women who can use birth control and marry when they choose tend to have fewer children. Societies that respect women's interests also typically have more married men, who have a reduced likelihood of engaging in violence. This is because married men have lower testosterone levels and tend to focus on their children rather than competing for partners.

Counterargument: Women’s Empowerment Does Not Foster Peace

Feminist international-relations scholar Laura Sjoberg disagrees with Pinker’s claim that women’s empowerment makes societies more peaceful. In Gendering Global Conflict, she argues that women are not inherently less violent than men. She contends that women can and do perpetrate, facilitate, desire, and benefit from political violence. Sjoberg also argues that women’s empowerment does not automatically make societies more peaceful. She contends that simply increasing women’s presence or formal power in political institutions will not, by itself, transform those institutions or the international system into more peaceful ones.